University of Neuchâtel & Witwatersrand

Visualize correlations in R

There are rare cases when a graphic is not better than a figure to help us understand our quantitative results. A simple yet common table we’re staring at ever so often are tables of correlation coefficients: how strongly do different variables correlate with one another. We’re scanning the tables for numbers close to +1 and close to -1, but there’s a better way: visualize!